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“Foundation Center 2020” is the 10-year strategic plan for the Foundation Center, launched in 2011. A continual work in progress, we invite your feedback to help shape, strengthen, and guide our progress in advancing knowledge about philanthropy.

Strategic Priority: Build the Global Data Platform for Philanthropy

With Philanthropy In/Sight, the Foundation Center has taken a giant step forward in building the platform for visualizing information about global philanthropy. In addition to information on nearly 94,000 U.S.-based grantmakers, this platform already includes foundations and grants in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and China. We have proven to ourselves and others that it is indeed possible to capture this data and display it in such a way that an interactive vision of philanthropy as a global movement begins to appear. We will now implement a strategy for doing this on a systematic basis through the work of data collection (directly and through partners), architecture (structuring it in a way that can be aggregated, compared, and researched), and access (maps, online tools, and other databases). Because of the differences in philanthropic cultures/practices around the globe, this will also entail building out the Foundation Center’s existing taxonomy, dealing with multiple languages and currencies, and with a host of other data and technology issues that will also improve the quality of our U.S. data. Moreover, the Foundation Center will need to ensure that it has a seat at the table in conversations with foreign aid donors, multilateral lenders, and government transparency advocates that are pushing to define future data standards with which, at a minimum, foundation data will need to be comparable. We know what this involves in terms of staff, IT capacity, web design, data visualization, and other resources to do it well, and feel strongly that the Foundation Center is the organization with the expertise, experience, and depth to take on a long-term challenge of this nature.